What year is it in the Persian calendar right now?

People reach for this more often than you’d think: filling a form, reading an Iranian news date, checking a document, and suddenly needing the Persian year that matches today. The Gregorian year on your screen won’t tell you, because the two calendars count from different starting points.

If you’d rather just see it for a specific date, set the converter to the day you care about and read the Persian side:

Why the Persian year is “this year minus 621” (usually)

The Solar Hijri calendar counts its years from the same starting event as the lunar Islamic calendar, the Hijra in 622 CE, but it measures them as solar years tied to the spring equinox (source: Encyclopædia Britannica, “Iranian calendar”). That offset, 621 to 622 years, is why 2025–2026 on the Gregorian calendar lines up with 1404 on the Persian one.

The reason it isn’t a single fixed number is the new-year boundary. The Persian year starts on 1 Farvardin, the day of the March equinox, not on 1 January. So for most of the Gregorian year the gap is 621, but from 1 January up to Nowruz the Persian calendar hasn’t turned over yet, so the gap is 622 in that window. That’s the whole trick, and it’s why “subtract 621” quietly fails for a date in, say, late January.

When the year actually changes

The rollover is not at midnight on any Gregorian date you can memorise. It happens at Nowruz, the instant of the vernal equinox, which lands on 20 or 21 March depending on the year. A worked example makes it concrete: the whole stretch from Nowruz in March 2025 to Nowruz in March 2026 is the Persian year 1404; the day after Nowruz 2026 begins 1405. So a date in, say, February 2026 is still 1404, while April 2026 is 1405, even though both sit in the same Gregorian year.

That single boundary is why a fixed offset trips people up near late March. The safe habit is to convert the specific date rather than carry a rule in your head. If you want the mechanics of why the Gregorian date of Nowruz itself drifts between the 20th and 21st, that has its own explanation in why Nowruz isn’t always on the same Gregorian day.

Converting a past or future year

The same logic works in both directions and for any year, not just the current one:

• Gregorian → Persian: subtract 621 (or 622 before Nowruz). 2027 maps to 1405/1406 across the Nowruz boundary.
• Persian → Gregorian: add 621 (622 before Nowruz). 1410 maps to roughly 2031.

For exact day-level results, including the month and day rather than just the year, the converter does the arithmetic and cross-checks it, so a date near the year boundary never comes out a year off. If you’re working with a birth date, the age calculator will also give your age correctly in either calendar.

If you want the bigger picture of how the year number, months, and leap days fit together, see how the Persian calendar works.

The short version: today it’s 1404, soon 1405, and the cleanest way to be sure for any given date is to convert it rather than rely on a fixed offset that breaks around Nowruz.